Month: March 2016

“As many of you know by now, on Wednesday we launched a chatbot called Tay. We are deeply sorry for the unintended offensive and hurtful tweets from Tay, which do not represent who we are or what we stand for, nor how we designed Tay. Tay is now offline and we’ll look to bring Tay back only when we are confident we can better anticipate malicious intent that conflicts with our principles and values.

I want to share what we learned and how we’re taking these lessons forward.

For context, Tay was not the first artificial intelligence application we released into the online social world. In China, our XiaoIce chatbot is being used by some 40 million people, delighting with its stories and conversations. The great experience with XiaoIce led us to wonder: Would an AI like this be just as captivating in a radically different cultural environment? Tay – a chatbot created for 18- to 24- year-olds in the U.S. for entertainment purposes – is our first attempt to answer this question.

As we developed Tay, we planned and implemented a lot of filtering and conducted extensive user studies with diverse user groups. We stress-tested Tay under a variety of conditions, specifically to make interacting with Tay a positive experience. Once we got comfortable with how Tay was interacting with users, we wanted to invite a broader group of people to engage with her. It’s through increased interaction where we expected to learn more and for the AI to get better and better.

The logical place for us to engage with a massive group of users was Twitter. Unfortunately, in the first 24 hours of coming online, a coordinated attack by a subset of people exploited a vulnerability in Tay. Although we had prepared for many types of abuses of the system, we had made a critical oversight for this specific attack. As a result, Tay tweeted wildly inappropriate and reprehensible words and images. We take full responsibility for not seeing this possibility ahead of time. We will take this lesson forward as well as those from our experiences in China, Japan and the U.S. Right now, we are hard at work addressing the specific vulnerability that was exposed by the attack on Tay.

Looking ahead, we face some difficult – and yet exciting – research challenges in AI design. AI systems feed off of both positive and negative interactions with people. In that sense, the challenges are just as much social as they are technical. We will do everything possible to limit technical exploits but also know we cannot fully predict all possible human interactive misuses without learning from mistakes. To do AI right, one needs to iterate with many people and often in public forums. We must enter each one with great caution and ultimately learn and improve, step by step, and to do this without offending people in the process. We will remain steadfast in our efforts to learn from this and other experiences as we work toward contributing to an Internet that represents the best, not the worst, of humanity.”

March 14 — or 3/14 — celebrates the mathematical constant of pi. Pi represents the ratio of circumference of a circle divided by its diameter. While it is often abbreviated as 3.14, pi has an infinite number of digits beyond the decimal point, starting with 3.141592653.

Last year’s Pi Day was one to celebrate since it was 3/14/15, perfectly matching the first numbers past the decimal point of pi. Last year, hardcore math fans even started celebrating the day at exactly 9:26 a.m. and 53 seconds. There’s a big reason to celebrate this year too — math enthusiasts are calling today ‘Rounded Pi Day.’

When rounding pi to the ten-thousandth (that’s four numbers past the decimal point), it comes out to 3.1416, matching today’s date — March 14, 2016.

And if you need any more reason to geek out about March 14, here’s one: it’s Albert Einstein’s 137th birthday.”

The Register – By: StorageBod – “I imagine there was a sharp intake of breath as Microsoft announced SQL Server for Linux, quickly followed by a checking of dates.

Yet it makes perfect sense; it’s a very sensible strategic move for Microsoft.

My question, and I know I’m not the only person asking this, is: what is the future of Windows in the data centre?

If SQL Server runs well on Linux, there are a vanishingly small number of workloads that I would want to run on Windows Server in a data centre. Yes, there are a lot of third party applicatons that run on Windows, and this is going to continue for many years, but I do really wonder if Microsoft’s heart is really in the Windows Server business.

Microsoft appear to have decided that their future is in cloud, not the enterprise data centre. I mean, it’s always been questionable whether anyone sane would run Exchange and now you don’t have to; Office 365 takes care of that for you.

A lot of people like Azure and, sure, Microsoft would prefer you to run your cloud apps in Azure, but if you want to run them elsewhere, they would like to still make money out of you. SQL Server on Linux will remove some of the friction for deployment in the cloud.

SQL Server running on Linux also allows Microsoft to compete with Oracle in those data centres where Windows is grudgingly tolerated. There are certainly those who will have you believe that SQL Server is not an enterprise product, but many of those comments have been driven by the stigma of Windows. I work with DBAs who do both; for most workloads, SQL Server and Oracle are equally good.

So what’s left for Microsoft to do?

Well, if they announce AD Services running on Linux, you’ll know that their heart is no longer in the Windows data centre.”

Streaming Media – By: Troy Dreier – “The compact and inexpensive Google Chromecast dominated the connected living room in 2015, says a report from Strategy Analytics. The Chromecast took 35 percent of the global set-top box and stick market, followed by Apple TV, Roku devices, and Amazon Fire TV. Those four brands control the streaming living room. The Chromecast’s low price makes it an impulse purchase, notes report author David Watkins, who adds that many prefer its mobile-centric approach to content access and control. The company’s Q3 2015 report also found that Chromecast owned 35 percent of the market.

While Chromecast took the largest market share, Apple has shipped the most units. Apple shipped nearly 37 million Apple TVs since the box first launched in 2007. Google has shipped 27 million Chromecasts since it debuted two-and-a-half years ago. Roku has shipped 20 million box and stick devices, while Amazon has shipped under 10 million Fire TVs.

Those four companies are finding plenty of willing buyers, as global demand for living room streaming devices was up 32 percent in 2015. The total amount of streaming devices (including game consoles, connected TVs, and Blu-ray Players) totaled 220 million units in 2015, with 84 million shipped in the last quarter.

The report also looks at the connected TV space, finding that Samsung, LG, and Sony make up 50 percent of the market share. However, TCL and Hisense and gaining fast, and are expanding outside of China.”

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